Tompkins County Relocalization Project

[Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>]

Hello TCRP Observers,

Changes to the TCRP project outline this week include the addition
of a set of questions from Simon St.Laurent relating to road
maintenance.

The project outline (http://ibiblio.org/tcrp/doc/project.htm)
continues to gain attention as a model for efforts elsewhere; I've
just been invited to attend a Peak Oil conference planned for late
April or early May in NYC.  The organizers say, "You have created
a document that other communities can study and learn from and we
would be very interested to hear how it came about and what
developments have occured since you made it available to the
public."  Gulp... I guess we'd better have something to talk about
by then!

Locally, I had the great pleasure of attending the Sustainable
Tompkins Welcome Salon November 2, where I met Sustainable
Tompkins programming chair Elan Shapiro and several other people
active in this area.  The Sustainable Tompkins site has been
restarted after a period of relative inactivity; it can be found
at http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/mbrown/index.htm .

Also present at the Salon was Michael d'Estries, webmaster of the
Groovy Green site (http://groovygreen.com/).  Groovy Green is a
sumptuous piece of work exemplifying an approach to web design at
the opposite end of the spectrum from the 1994-vintage hand-coded
technology I use for ibiblio.org/tcrp.  Check it out -- it's an
outstanding local resource, providing among other things a
badly-needed calendar of local events related to sustainability.

Michael Burns, maintainer of the Finger Lakes Permaculture list,
happened to be attending a meeting in a room adjacent to the Salon
and was able to join us toward the end.  He said he would look
into forming a webring to link our sites (TCRP, Sustainable
Tompkins, and Groovy Green), and we agreed to cross-link them.  I
believe that we all see these various efforts as complementing
rather than competing with each other.

Bethany Schroeder, who has taken responsibility for the Health
Care part of the TCRP, has just started up a PostCarbon outpost
called "PostCarbon Ithaca."  The outposts are an initiative of the
PostCarbon Institute (http://postcarbon.org/), and you have to
sign up there before you can access PCI, which is linked from the
PostCarbon site.  Once you're signed up (which is free), you can
post comments or ask questions in a basic blogging mode.  There's
not much there yet, but I imagine that this will change as people
in our area become more interested in the subject of Peak Oil.

As noted earlier, people who are committed to contributing to the
TCRP (meaning that they will take responsibility for doing some of
the research) will be meeting November 30 to form a schedule and
begin work.  Please contact me (bosak AT ibiblio.org) if you're
willing to take on some of this, but note that it's not a
discussion group -- it's a collaborative research and publishing
project.  If you'd like to participate in a sustainability
discussion group, I'd recommend the Sustainable Tompkins groups;
if you'd like to help form a group specifically to discuss Peak
Oil, contact Bethany (nidus AT pinax.com) so that she can start
planning a meeting.

Jon